The Translator’s Invisibility

Pound, like Bunting and Eliot, concealed his modernist appropriation of foreign texts behind a claim of cultural autonomy for translation. He concluded his 1929 essay “Guido’s Relations” by briefly distinguishing between an “interpretive translation,” prepared as an “accompaniment” to the foreign text, and “the ‘other sort’” of translation, which possesses an aesthetic independence:

The “other sort,” I mean in cases where the “translator” is definitely making a new poem, falls simply in the domain of original writing, or if it does not it must be censured according to equal standards, and praised with some sort of just deduction, assessable only in the particular case.

(Anderson 1983:251)

Pound drew this distinction when he published his own translations. As David Anderson has observed, the 1920 collection Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound ended with a “Main outline of E.P.’s works to date,” in which Pound classified “The Seafarer,” “Exile’s Letter (and Cathay in general),” and “Homage to Sextus Propertius” as “Major Personae,” whereas his versions of Cavalcanti and Provençal poets like Arnaut Daniel were labelled “Etudes,” study guides to the foreign texts (Anderson 1983:xviii–xix). Pound saw them all as his “poems,” but used the term “Major Personae” to single out translations that deserved to be judged according to the same standards as his “original writing.” The appeal to these (unnamed) standards means of course that Pound’s translations put foreign texts in the service of a modernist poetics, evident, for example, in his use of free verse and precise language, but also in the selection of foreign texts where a “persona” could be constructed, an independent voice or mask for the poet. Here it is possible to see that the values Pound’s autonomous translations inscribed in foreign texts included not only a modernist poetics, but an individualism that was at once romantic and patriarchal. He characterized the translation that is a “new poem” in the individualistic terms of romantic expressive theory (“the expression of the translator”). And what received expression in translations like “The Seafarer” and “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” was the {192} psychology of an aggressive male or a submissive female in a maledominated world.

Yet Pound’s translation theory and practice were various enough to qualify and redirect his modernist appropriation of foreign texts, often in contradictory ways. His concept of “interpretive translation,” or “translation of accompaniment,” shows that for him the ideal of cultural autonomy coincided with a kind of translation that made explicit its dependence on domestic values, not merely to make a cultural difference at home, but to signal the difference of the foreign text. In the introduction to his translation, Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912) , Pound admitted that “in the matter of these translations and of my knowledge of Tuscan poetry, Rossetti is my father and my mother, but no one man can see everything at once” (Anderson 1983:14). Pound saw Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ s versions as the resource for an archaic lexicon, which he developed to signify the different language and cultural context of Cavalcanti’s poetry:

It is conceivable the poetry of a far-off time or place requires a translation not only of word and of spirit, but of “accompaniment,” that is, that the modern audience must in some measure be made aware of the mental content of the older audience, and of what these others drew from certain fashions of thought and speech. Six centuries of derivative convention and loose usage have obscured the exact significance of such phrases as: “The death of the heart,” and “The departure of the soul.”

(ibid.:12)